Filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña is the producer of “Asian Americans,” a five-part PBS series that will be broadcast on May 11 and 12. At UCLA, she is a professor of Asian American studies, director of the Center for EthnoCommunications, and holder of the Alumni and Friends of Japanese American Ancestry Endowed Chair. She is an Academy Award nominee for her documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?”

UCLA law professor Steven Bank, who specializes in business and tax law and teaches a seminar in soccer law, also sees wisdom in settling, noting that U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner’s ruling shifted the leverage to U.S. Soccer. “There is no question that between [April 30 and May 1 following the ruling], the women potentially lost millions of dollars,” said Bank, alluding to the team’s pursuit of roughly $67 million in back pay. “That is the harsh reality.”

“Anyone at any age can become infected,” said Dr. Timothy Brewer, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at UCLA. “But we are seeing very different outcomes in what happens after people are infected.”

“I think it just shows us that the spread of this virus, no matter how careful you are, can happen. And this is a very important moment for everybody to understand that nobody is immune to this virus unless they’ve had it — and that’s a whole different question we’ll discuss later on,” said UCLA’s Anne Rimoin. (Rimoin was also interviewed again on CNN here and here, as well as on MSNBC and Fox Business News.)

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the post-apocalyptic branch of science fiction is not where we are headed,” said [UCLA’s] Deborah Nadoolman Landis, a Hollywood costume designer and fashion scholar. “I don’t think anybody wants to look like Neo from ‘The Matrix’ right now. I think people want to take embroidered handkerchiefs and stitch them together to make a blouse — things that are pretty and soft, that help with a feeling of security in a time that’s so unknown.”

“We have come a long way since 1994 and Prop. 187,” said Victor Narro, project director for the UCLA Labor Center, who was not involved with the survey, referring to a 1994 California initiative to deny state services such as public education and healthcare to people in the country illegally. “I think this just highlights that.”

“You cannot expect fever and symptom screening to be any kind of foolproof measure,” says Jamie Lloyd-Smith, a professor at University of California Los Angeles who studies the spread of emerging infectious diseases. “Covid-19 seems to be spread quite effectively by people who are hard to detect this way.” Lloyd-Smith published a study in February that built on models of how well symptom and risk-factor screening worked during the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak. For Covid-19, he concluded that even in a best-case scenario, screening for symptoms like cough or fever, or asking people about possible exposure to the disease, would miss more than half of infected people.

Countywide, one in five black residents was diagnosed with asthma at some point in his or her life, the highest rate among major racial and ethnic groups except for Native Americans, according to UCLA’s California Health Interview Survey.… Steven Wallace, who conducts research on race and aging at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said black residents of Los Angeles County are more likely to be frontline workers, to live in multigenerational housing and to have poorer access to both coronavirus testing and healthcare than white residents.

UCLA’s clinical trial of plasma to treat COVID-19 patients has been used on 30 people so far.
“We’ve had people who have done better. We’ve had people who have stayed the same. It’s hard to tell with such a limited number of patients who have received this convalescent plasma,” said Dr. Alyssa Ziman, the head of UCLA’s plasma study to treat COVID-19 patients.

How much emotional benefit you get from virtual communication may come down to your mindset, says Jenny Taitz, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If we write off a friend texting us,” she says, “we’re not going to be able to enjoy or savor the dose of connection that they’re offering us.”

Others agree that people really do have the capacity to change their minds and behaviors. “It is certainly possible to change your personality, and it happens pretty quickly,” says Gary Small, M.D., director of the University of California, Los Angeles Longevity Center and author of Snap, a book about the power people have to adopt new habits of mind.

“The very first week of March, L.A. County Health Department released its first map of COVID cases. And they were all located in West L.A., which is the high-income area… And some people said, it might pass minority communities completely. And I said, wait a minute. Who has the discretionary time and income to travel to Europe, to Asia?” said UCLA’s Dr. David Hayes-Bautista (approx. 5:40 mark).

“As you rightly pointed out, in the beginning there was the thought that maybe children are less affected, less infectious. But the latest data and the latest research have supported a slightly different picture,” said UCLA’s Karin Michaels (approx. 6:15 mark.)

“I really hope that the elderly will stay home and take precautions, and the people who really don’t need to go out will consider, really think about, staying home,” said UCLA’s Angelica Jaime (approx. 35:30 mark).

Meanwhile, Chandra Ford, director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice and Health at UCLA, told City Council members that government officials should try to ensure that communities suffering from COVID-19 don’t become subject to higher levels of policing and arrest as a collateral consequence of the virus — something there’s already evidence of in the disparities in who’s getting punished by the NYPD for social distancing violations.

Researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles published a study that could serve as a guideline for the state’s officials to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution by 2050 significantly. If the state follows the instructions from the research, about 14,000 lives would be saved yearly, experts say. Yifang Zhu, a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and one of the authors of the study, says that attaining cleaner air and healthier lives should not necessitate a pandemic before people start showing action.

It is possible for HPV to spread through direct skin-to-skin contact, but it would be much more likely for you to get infected if you had a cut or other break in the skin barrier. That’s because HPV targets the basal layer of the epidermis, called the basal keratinocytes. A cut or other opening offers a direct path to that layer of skin, says Sara Hogan, M.D., dermatologist at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica.